Sunday, 29 December 2013

I hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas. We have had a week off and go back on the 2nd. Lovely to have time to chill and catch up with family and friends I don't see very often.

Scandal has enjoyed being spoilt and even had time for a spot of dusting, see above photo. She is such a funny, tolerant girl. I have clearly got a ridiculous sense of humour as taking this photo I was pretty much crying with laughter. Scandal just goes along with it patiently, which cracks me up even more.

Olympia has come and gone, I was thrilled with how Scandal worked, definitely the most confident out of the 3 years we have been. She *just* put an extra jump in... which my boss at work pointed out perhaps we should have got bonus points for ;-)

We have been playing around with teaching ketschkers over the past couple of months. I went to a Lisa Frick camp in June which was brilliant. I can't say I will be changing overnight to this type of handling, and I didn't put it in the ring in 2013 as I think it should be taught properly first. I don't think ketschkers are always necessary, and have certainly seen a humongous amount of terrible ones done in the ring this year (of course an equal amount of front crosses, but I have just been looking out for the ketschkers ;-)) however there are a couple of scenarios which I think this handling really suits and benefits the dog, so I have decided to teach it with Jed and then I can use it in the ring if I think it's suitable on a particular course. I love teaching the dogs new stuff, so this is FUN :-)

Scandal thinks this is a great new trick and picked it up very quickly, although only in the house with no equipment. Jedlar got the gist of it but unfortunately we also taught him the 'startline setup' involving circling you and then coming through your legs from behind. So sometimes he offers this instead, and headbutts me in the back of my legs. Jed's head is like concrete, so it's not the nicest of pains... hopefully he will work it out quite soon ;-)

Scandal went to Lowri at the beginning of December and she was all good. Jed also went. I have been dreading Jed going as he flings his body all over the place, he is a total bull-in-a-china-shop dog and doesn't do things by halves. So I was a bit scared that Lowri might say he was totally broken... as usual this was a slight overreaction from me and Jed wasn't too bad :-) Accupuncture, massage, and water physio later and he is looking much better and we have just started some gentle training again. He has really matured in the last 6 months and I can't wait to compete with him next year.

Honeyspaniel is still... Honey. It is strange that she is now 7, I still think of her as about 3 years old. Imogen has been doing little bits of training and they had a 2nd in grade 7 agility at Clevedon show a couple of weeks back. I got invited onto the squad with her which I was really chuffed with, but declined it as I haven't worked her since May when she got her 3rd CC :-) I am tempted to do one or two shows with her next year just for fun-ness.... maybeeeee.... we shall see :-)

Thursday, 5 December 2013

5 years has really flown by... this time 5 years ago I was all in a pickle because there were only 2 girls born in Ruby's litter of 8, and one of those girls was a tri, with a brown leg. I wanted a red and white girl with two white legs, leaving only 1 girl to choose from! I spent hours at Jackie and Ant's each week, watching the puppies growing up. My head was saying the red and white girl, after all I didn't like tri's, and I definitely didn't want one with a brown leg.

However my heart was saying the naughty tri colour, who's puppy name was "Big Bertha". She was double trouble, always into mischief, loved playing, and was soooo inquisitive. I had wanted the puppy's name to begin with an 'S', and had, for many months, decided it would be Summer. However, this naughty tri-colour just didn't suit the name Summer, she was far too naughty. She was a MONSTER... and so the name Scandal (or Scandalsaurus) seemed more suited.

It was very odd at first having a puppy in the house again. By this point Ricky was almost 10, and Tia was 6 going on 7, and as Tia was my sister's until a year old I didn't do any of her training until she was over a year old. So, it felt as if I hadn't had a puppy for 10 years, and when I had Ricky, I was 10, and had NO CLUE about dog training, and couldn't really remember what I did with him anyway. Scandal landed on her feet and acted as if she had always been here.

So.... 5 years later... I am so proud of what we have achieved... having the most amazing journey, each year just seems to get better and better :-)

Scandal is very patient at having her photo taken... but sometime she does seem to get a little bored of it ;-)